just happened to be:

The singer of the Kiltless Jocks was not a Scot but an Austrian known as Crazy Horst, whose two missing front teeth did little to enhance the intelligibility of the band’s lyrics; not that the public minded. Horst was Eileen’s spouse and such a Scotophile that he claimed descendance from Robert the Bruce, an assertion made even less credible by similar insistence that he could trace his origins back to Mozart (Horst was from Salzburg), Joan and Noah (of Arc and Ark fames), Nebuchadnezzar, and other assorted characters from the Bible and the folklore of a long list of countries. Nevertheless, Horst’s interest in Scotland, its culture and particularly the west coast was real enough. Proof thereof lay in protracted doctorate studies at the university of Edinburgh on the collective nostalgia of the Western Isles.

He maintained that the Outer Hebrides was the site of the Garden of Eden. Both he and Eileen therefore recommended that I visit Moira, Eileen’s sister, who lived on Benbecula with her sheep-farmer, fisherman, jack-of-all-trades husband, Willy the Muc. Ever restless, I decided to go, but would start with a visit to the small isle of Barra, one of the southernmost islands.

Barra turned out to be nearly as beautiful as Horst had waxed. Perhaps he was related to Robert the Bruce after all. The island is only a few miles in circumference and can be covered on foot in a day. I arrived in the village of Castlebay, where the ferry docks, and walked westwards, past a modern hotel where the Shah of Iran had apparently (F6) sent his family after the 1978 Islamic revolution. The path then led down to a wide expanse of white beach, which was used as an airstrip for flights from Glasgow and made of shells that had been pounded by the breakers. At the northern end of the island I hitched a ride in a leaky rowing boat, past colonies of Grey (Halichoerus grypus) and Common seals (Phoca vitulina) and over to the next island, South Uist. From there I thumbed lifts in a mobile library and street lamp repair machine to Moira and Willy the Muc’s croft. They asked me to stay in the house but I preferred to pitch the tent.

Since “Muc” means pig in Gaelic I initially assumed Willy had been given his name because of deficient personal hygiene. However, he insisted it came from the time he had been accused of pig rustling in Ayrshire, an offence he neither denied nor admitted. Moira was a small woman with a big heart and Willy a huge equally big-hearted and more bear- than pig-like man whose belly projected between a perpetually too-short T-shirt and his trousers.

At 10 o’clock Willy told me we’d better be off to the ferry. I wouldn’t usually have got in a vehicle with a driver whose alcohol/blood volume ratio had undergone such a drastic booze-induced transformation, but there were only two ferries a week from Lochboisdale to Oban and I didn’t want to miss mine. Moreover, the single lane roads of Benbecula and South Uist would probably see no other driver until the following Monday. We got into his battered old Mini van that reeked of fish, sheep and illegal still. I settled onto the three-legged passenger stool and Willy snuggled down onto the wooden driver’s crate. As we drove I wondered why a street lamp repair machine travelled the roads of South Uist when there were no street lamps.

We arrived in Lochboisdale where I boarded the ferry, accompanied by Willy the Muc. We went down to a small cabin where he pulled a bottle of whiskey from his pocket.

“Just one for the road.”

The next morning I emerged from the cabin and went up on deck to breathe the sea spray and let the fresh wind liven me up. Just as we were sailing past the Isle of Mull, Willy appeared looking groggy. The boat back to South Uist didn't leave till Tuesday.

“Uggggh, ” he groaned. “Moira’ll kill me!”

"Machair" is a Gaelic word that describes a low-lying fertile plain and often refers to the coastal grassland formed when calcareous sand is blown inland from beaches and dunes by prevailing winds. The machair in the Outer Hebrides contains a high percentage of eroded shells (80-90%) and provides a rare habitat for a wide variety of grasses, flowering plants and many species of bird, including the rare corn crake (Crex crex). Although the bird's scientific name is thought to have resulted from its association with a popular breakfast cereal, it is apparently an onomatopoeic representation of the sound that would be heard if two notched sticks were rubbed together.

The unique surroundings of the Hebridean machair may thus be easily recreated in any city office environment by carving indentations into two pencils and sliding one pencil over the other. 

just happened to be:

Just happened to be in a pub on the Outer Hebridean island of Benbecula. It was only five to nine on Saturday evening but the publican was ringing the bell for last orders as the following day was the Sabbath. Occupants of the fume-filled saloon bar picked up their glasses and walked through a doorway to the lounge bar. Here, in the southern, Catholic part of the island, the night would continue into the small hours.

I would not be staying for long because I had to get to Lochboisdale in South Uist by 11.30 to catch the ferry to Oban. For the last week I had been camping on a patch of heather outside the croft of Moira and her husband Willy the Muc and was now in the pub with them. Fortunately, they had promised me a lift to the ferry. I looked at my watch, wondering if we should leave. Moira announced she was off home, wished me a good journey and told me Willy the Muc would see me to Lochboisdale.

The visit to South Uist had been suggested by Moira’s sister, Eileen, whom I had got to know quite well in Edinburgh and who played the keyboards in a band called the “Kiltless Jocks”. Kiltless often needed a support group at their gigs so I and some friends obliged by forming a group whose lyrics were inspired by the small print of boring official letters, accompanied by an ill-played mandolin. Reaching the third song was generally a great sign of success while audience rejection levels were gauged on a scale of missiles per minute (mpm). Yet by the time we were helped off stage, the way had been unselfishly paved for an hour or so’s Kiltless glory and a rapturous reception from their stubbornly die-hard fans.

A Sudanese businessman whose Khartoum aspirin factory was flattened in 1998 by US cruise missiles after claims it was making chemical weapons for al-Qaeda owns a major stake in a company that provides security at Britain's main nuclear power stations.

At Dounreay in Scotland, however, nuclear safety and security will shortly cease to be a cause for concern as the reactor is to be decommissioned and converted into the first centre to produce bickering power.

Rigorous irritability tests have been performed throughout the country to select couples with a particularly rampant tendency to squabble. Bickering will take place in a high-tech reactor room where the heat produced will be captured and transformed into mechanical and thereafter electrical energy.

Power station experts have devised a special handbook of provocation techniques to prompt and exacerbate ill-feeling among quibblers, using highly-effective and proven procedures. Such methods include unfairly issuing blame, making unreasonable demands, undermining self-belief and sense of dignity, wearing down faith in personal competence, debasement of personal authority in the presence of third parties, deriding physical characteristics, mocking linguistic and cognitive capacities, unfavourable comparison with present and non-present third parties, manipulation of feelings of guilt, refusal to acknowledge the right to self-expression, purposeful neglect of physical and emotional needs, quashing social interaction with third parties and strangling the right to self-development.

It is envisaged that enough heat will be produced in the reactor room to drive the station's turbines and yield sufficient BeV (bickering electron volts) to power the television sets of all households in Scotland for at least five hours a day. This, in turn, will generate sufficient negative energy in homes to produce upwardly-spiralling ill feeling and thus provide for limitless future bickering. Although this highly sustainable form of energy has been welcomed by environmental groups, psychologists and social workers have expressed their doubts. 

erithacus' saga: the irresistible pull of the vortex of bickering

Mary and I walked in silence along the narrow pavement by the road. Cars and lorries raced past and filled the air with exhaust fumes while roadworks and people scuttling in all directions made walking side by side difficult. Contact was further impeded by the racket of a pneumatic drill, the din of which would have made hearing the pipes and drums of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders difficult. A human voice was therefore clearly out of the question. Talking would have to wait until we were well out of the repair zone and able to stop walking in single file.

“I’m sorry about the other night,” Mary said.
“Why?” I asked.
“For acting like I did,” she explained.
“What’s wrong with acting like you did?” I enquired.
“Is there anything wrong with me saying sorry about how I acted?” she reacted.
“No, nothing at all,” I answered.
“Then there was something wrong about the way I acted?” she insisted.
“No there wasn’t,” I snapped, “I said there was nothing wrong about you saying sorry about the way you acted. I didn’t say there was anything wrong with the way you acted.”
“Yes you did,” she declared. “You asked me why I was sorry about the way I acted, as if it was perfectly acceptable to shout and scream at people. I just wanted to say sorry and now you’re telling me that I shouldn’t apologise.”
“I didn’t say you shouldn’t apologise,” I insisted, feeling snared. “I only meant that I don’t need you to say sorry. I had a good time the other night,”

Mary obviously didn’t like what I had said.
“What do you mean you had a good time with me the other night? If you enjoyed seeing me get completely filthy and walking about in the mud with a couple of plastic bags on my feet, you must be some kind of sadist.”
“I meant I liked being with you. I just liked being with you, whatever happened. Anyway, they were fertiliser bags,” I corrected her pedantically.

We both went quiet and entered a park. The wind was blowing slightly and the evening sun brought out the shades of green of the trees and the grass.

Fuseli warns of the perils of alternative therapies in "When I click my fingers again...." (1779).

 

just happened to be:

Just happened to be on a plane flying from Khartoum to London. I had said goodbye to Abdullah the previous day and had now left Sudan, probably for good. The orange-brown Egyptian desert could be made out below through the window of the plane and the air-conditioning hissed as most passengers slept or tried to.

I was in motion again but sadness scraped away at the pit of my stomach. I tried to avoid it by thinking of arrival at Heathrow. However, the prospects were gloomy. It was late March, I had no jersey or coat and only one hundred US dollars and no particular destination.

Nevertheless, I was glad I had found Abdullah, given him the dosh and thus become an ex-money bags in the process.

Abdullah was a teacher at Kadulgi primary school, which meant his salary was very meagre. In the three years I had lived near the town, he and his cousin Kubiah had been very friendly to me. Kubiah lived in a series of huts just off the potholed road northwards to Dilling and El Obeid, about an hour’s walk from the town. He lived with his family, his sister-in-law and her children (Kubiah’s nephews and nieces). Kubiah’s brother had disappeared in mysterious circumstances a few years earlier and had probably been killed by the Sudanese army.

Perhaps the circumstances had not been so mysterious. The Kadugli area and the Nuba Mountains were known to the Khartoum government as War Zone II. Some Nuba (people) secretly belonged to the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).

Although most Nuba in the Kadugli area had converted to Islam and had Islamic names, they resented the “Arabisation” of their land by northern tribes and the use of religion as a justification for land seizures. Kubiah and his brother had once been members of the Kordofan Communist Party, a political organisation with a crudely Marxist line and basically a political expression of resentment against the northerners.

Both Kubiah and his brother had often been arrested in Kadugli and they and their families had been threatened on several occasions. The two cousins therefore thought it would be safest for all of them if they went to Khartoum. However, in Khartoum they were arrested again for demonstrating against the regime of Jaffaar Nimeiri, a corrupt president who introduced a distorted form of Islamic law to the whole of Sudan to win support of Islamist parties in the north. The brothers had been beaten and then separated. Kubiah never saw his brother again.

He was loaded onto a lorry with around fifty other Nuba people and southern Sudanese and transported by the army desertwards to a point a couple of hundred kilometres northwest of Khartoum. There, the prisoners were dumped and left to their fate. Kubiah would have died if a couple of lorries travelling in the opposite direction had not appeared a few hours later and taken the former detainees back to the capital. From there, Kubiah decided to flee to Communist Ethiopia, which was considered to be a safe haven for southern Sudanese rebels.

He made it to Addis Ababa and thereafter travelled to Moscow and then on to Kazakstan, where he lived for several years and learnt helicopter maintenance.
Kubiah had shown me photos of grey Soviet-design blocks of flats where he had dwelled and felt homesick.

After the fall of Nimeiri, a brief period of “democracy” produced slightly better conditions and so some exiles were able to return. The family of Kubiah’s brother was suffering hardships and the children were too young to look after the crops and animals. Amina, Kubiah’s sister-in-law managed to convince the chief of police in Kadulgi to give her brother-in-law a written amnesty and thus Kubiah was persuaded to go home.

When he returned, he worked both on the farm and as a driver for international aid agencies. They only helicopter maintenance required was on machines used by the Sudanese army for operations against the Nuba people. Kubiah, naturally, was not prepared to work on them

Barcelona's changing skyline has recently witnessed the appearance of the "Torre Agbar" (waterworks head office - 2004), designed by architect Jean Nouvel.

According to www.greatbuildings.com, Nouvel's work strives to "create a stylistic language separate from that of modernism and post-modernism... (and the architect) initiates each project with his mind cleared of any preconceived ideas". Hmmmm.

Although the building is affectionately known by locals as "el supositori", experts believe that Nouvel sought inspiration in the Cerne Abbas Giant. Furthermore, despite conspicuously absent references to Samuel Coleridge, there are fears that the Torre Agbar will become flaccid with age.
 

erithacus' saga: harmonious relations

One evening, when Mary and I were both simultaneously being frisked as we left the warehouse, I watched Mary lift her arms to allow the woman security guard to pat the outside of her breasts in a making-sure-that-no-spoons-for-tunnel-digging-were-being-nicked-from-the-prison-camp-dining-room style search for pilfered Vanguard Fashions bras. Mary caught my gaze and rolled her eyes warehouse roofward to indicate how bothersome this ritual had become.

“Do you want to check my underpants?” I asked.

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” answered the woman frisker’s male counterpart Dixon-of-Dock-Greenedly.

“I was asking your opposite number,” I commented jovially nodding at the woman frisker. This gave rise to witchlike cackles from some of the pickers who were scurrying through the exit towards freedom. Mary smiled at me. Better than being ignored I thought.

“Are you catching the bus?” I asked when we were outside. She was usually in a hurry to get home, prepare her son’s tea or go to her evening classes.

“No,” she replied. “Gandalf’s gone to a birthday party. I’ll walk. It’s a nice day.”

“I’ll come with you,” I declared with such determination that I felt the voice was not mine but that of a being inhabiting me.

“But it’s not on your way....” she replied, breaking off, probably to avoid the word “home” or any reference to where I lived. I wondered whether the shed had become a taboo, like cannibalism or incest.

taboo n., adj., & v. (also tabu)
n. (pl. taboos or tabus)
1 a system or the act of setting a person or thing apart as sacred, prohibited, or accursed.

The shed was certainly neither sacred nor prohibited.

“I want to,” I affirmed as if I had been peeking at the self-assertion titles on Mary’s bookshelf.

We left the warehouse and walked in silence through the compound, past another Checkpoint Charlie-like security check at the entrance to the company premises. This one was to stop unwanted visitors from getting in although why they should wish to was incomprehensible.

One of the three species of vampire bat, Desmodus rotundus (or Old-fashioned Fatty to the other two species) needs to consume half its body weight in blood each day. Since hanging onto a mammal by its teeth for twenty minutes can be a very tricky operation, many young inexpert bats fail to drink their fill. Studies on food-sharing have shown that although bats that go hungry for three days are likely to starve to death, other successful roostmates regurgitate blood both to famished related and totally unrelated recipients. Close observation has shown that this is not a willy-nilly occurrence and that individuals deny food to upstart roostmates from whom they have previously been refused nourishment.

This suggests mutual back-scratching despite the use of such behaviour to demonstrate altruism in the animal world. Wilkinson (1986) also found that food was traded for non-food benefits and bats exchanged nosh for claw massages and football cards.

When compared to the vampire bat's subtle and sophisticated levels of social awareness, the fruit-eating, nectar-sucking megabat's nocturnal cries of "me, me, me" are enough to put any self-respecting Chiroptera to shame.
 

just happened to be:

Just happened to be in a seedy drinking den in a slum area of Omdurman, a dusty city on the other side of the river from Khartoum. The area was mainly inhabited by refugees from Sudan’s neighbouring countries, most of which had been or were suffering armed conflict or civil wars that had prompted mass exoduses to Sudan. It was said that about two million people lived in these shanty towns, in which there was neither water to drink or wash nor any system of sanitation or sewage.

I, money bags, was looking for Abdullah Bashir to offer him the stacks of banknotes I had been given the previous day. His cousin Ramadan, whom I had found with some other Kadugli people drinking coffee in a square in the city centre, had told me where I could find him. After a couple of hour’s walk and much searching in the maze-like refugee district for the right house I apprehensively went through a door in an earth wall. Inside was a compound in which there were two or three huts, a few chickens and goats and an old toothless Nuba woman called Suruma. There were also several young-looking heavily made-up women who stared at me and made no effort to cover their heads with their tobes (head garments worn by Sudanese women in public or the presence of men). It took me a while to realise the house was a brothel and Suruma was its manager. The women, unused to visits from khawajas (white people), giggled.

These women were from the Region of the Nuba mountains in central Sudan. Like the people from the south they had been forced to migrate from their homes because of the civil war. Many ended up in the slums of Khartoum where there was very little work, especially for illiterate one-time self-sufficient farmers who had previously tended land and livestock. Many of the children were orphans whose parents had died in or as a result of the war. One way or another, economic hardship drove a lot of homeless girls into prostitution.

Suddenly Abdullah appeared from one of the huts with a huge grin on his face.

“Khawaja!” he bellowed and both shook me vigorously and gave me a vice-like sternum-crushing hug. Although he had emerged rearranging his trousers, I was sure he had not been using the brothel service but had come in search of illicit alcohol. Officially, drinking was banned under Islamic Law. However, many people, especially from the non-Islamic south, were willing to risk the exemplary lashings they could theoretically have been dealt, and continued to drink Marissa, albeit furtively in drinking dens. Illicit activities go together. If whistling were made illegal, it would soon be associated with prostitution and banned drugs.

“How do you find these places?” I asked Abdullah.

He ignored my question and beckoned me into the hut from which he had just emerged.

Inside, we sat down on low stools and waited for our eyes to get used to the darkness.

“Wine?” he asked. When Abdullah talked of wine he was referring to Marissa, a slightly alcoholic drink made from red sorghum that tasted a bit like rancid cider. I usually forwent it because of the games it subsequently played with my intestines. However, on this occasion I accepted his offer. It might be the last time we saw each other.

The viscous, rectum-threatening Marissa was served in a gourd the size of a large bucket. Abdullah stirred it with a smaller cup-sized gourd, which he then filled and passed to me.

“Drink!” he commanded. I swallowed the contents and winced.

Outside Suruma shouted something in Nuba and a smiling young women appeared in the doorway.

“Suruma asked if you like the girl?” Abdullah translated onto Arabic.
“Jameela jiddan” (she’s very nice) I replied politely. This caused shrieks of laughter outside. The young woman’s name was Jameela.

“If you say that they think you want to sleep with her, “ explained Abdullah. “Better you say you don’t like her, “ he said and then added slyly, “unless you want to sleep with her”.

So I said I didn’t like her. Surumi, however, had every intention of cashing in on the visit of a rich khawaja. She popped her head through the door and asked me in Arabic whether the girl was too old and if I wanted another. I told her I didn’t want a girl.

Abdullah and I took it in turns to drink from the gourd and the Marissa gradually disappeared. More giggles came from outside and a few minutes later a teenage boy entered the hut.

Abdullah laughed loudly. “They think you don’t like girls” he explained, “and you want a boy”. I shook my head and he roared at the boy to get out. Shouting orders was something I did not come easy to me.

A few moments later a goat wandered into the hut while outside the women were howling with glee. The goat bleated.

-

Just as the Marissa came to an end I offered Abdullah the money. He accepted with no fuss. Although I suggested making our way to the hotel to pick up the bags, he said it would be best to sleep where we were and get the money the following day.

Samuel Coleridge's opium addiction caused him serious gynaecomastia (development of abnormal breast tissue in men) and erectile dysfunction that led his lover, Dorothy Wordsworth, to describe him as "one whose realm is not that of the land twixt the sheets".

Coleridge's concern however was not for the shag but the albatross, which is now in danger of extinction. Its plight is caused by industrial long-line fishing and worsened by slow reproduction rates (one egg per clutch) and apparent monogamy. 90% of all bird species are said not to cheat on their partners, although they are serial monogamists (with only one partner at a time) rather than "Till death do us partists".

This belief, however, is contested by animal behaviourist Kate Huyvaert, who studied the Waved Albatross (Diomedea irrorata) on the Galapagos Island of Española. DNA paternity tests showed that one out of every four chicks tested did not match the fingerprint of the male bird that was caring for it in the nest. Observation of mating habits also revealed that one female mated 85 times with 49 different partners in seven weeks. So it's not so much a case of "how" but "who's your father" and it certainly wasn't Coleridge.
 

The Maribou stork (Leptoptilos crumeniferus) is not a bird to mess with. Even the lappet-faced vulture (Torgos tracheliotus, or cantankerous old flaphead as it is unaffectionately known to Serengeti's other inhabitants) feigns a polite "after you" at dinner. In this unofficial studio shot the Maribou glares menacingly as the photographer struggles to find the bird's most flattering side. 

erithacus' saga: erithacus yearns

Over the next few days, each time the tannoy sounded I pricked up my ears in the hope of hearing “Vanguard Fashions Erithacus to the office please!”. However, only Mike and the other warehouse operators were summoned. I felt jealous and neglected and took to ruminating. When that didn’t work I began lurking around outside the office door. One afternoon I phoned the office from inside a lorry trailer. An unfamiliar voice answered “Vanguard Fashions. How may I be of assistance?” I hung up.

Mary had been taking a night school self-assertiveness course, probably as the result Jim’s old-school character assassination and public derision management techniques. It was rumoured he had a Phd in sarcasm and humiliation. Jim was thus not party to business fads about getting the most of people by making them feel good in their jobs and share in the company’s corporate culture. These he qualified as “a load of shite”.

Mary’s bookshelves were laden with snappy titles such as “Be yourself, feel yourself” and “How not to do what other people want you to do when you don’t want to do it - or how to do what you want to when other people don’t want you to do it”.

It was therefore quite logical that having read all this stuff she should reach the conclusion that my squalid living conditions were the natural result of a fundamental lack of self-respect or self -esteem and a cyclical consequential and causative renunciation of personal dignity and validity as a human being. This was all probably quite true and also beneficial from my point of view as it was to lead to the rapprochement for which I yearned.

just happened to be:

Just happened to be in the head office of the Bank of Sudan in Khartoum, waiting to cash a Ministry of Education cheque for an end of contract lump sum and salary payments the Ministry had not paid over the previous two years.

I reached the front of the queue and the cashier exchanged the cheque for several stacks of new, crisp Sudanese one- and five-pound notes. He also gave me two poor quality see-through carrier bags into which we stuffed most of the money until the bags reached breaking point. He wrapped the remaining bundles of cash in newspaper, which smelled of peanut sauce.

I walked out of the sweaty heat of the bank into the lung-scorching heat of Khartoum carrying two flimsy plastic bags from which money was poking conspicuously. There were no taxis or buses in the sandy potholed streets because of petrol rationing so I walked back to my cheap hotel. Funny to think that I had chosen it the previous day because I only had the money to pay for one night’s stay.

I was carrying enough cash to buy a house and was due to fly to the UK in two days. Only $100 Sudanese pounds could be legally changed into hard currency and I had already reached the statutory limit. There was a thriving black market I could use but that was both morally dodgy and potentially life-threatening. Although Sudanese hospitality would normally put the “developed” world to shame and I had never experienced any violence against me, changing two bagfulls of new banknotes would be asking for trouble.

I eventually decided to give the money away. After ruling out NGOs and charitable organisations, I decided to give it to Abdullah Bashir, a friend from Kadulgi whom I had been told would be in Khartoum during Ramadan. Although there was no phone network and even if there had been he wouldn’t have been connected to it, I knew a place where people from Kadugli met in the evening. They would be able to where he was.

Among the many works Titian painted to accompany Harry Partridge's "All-time Favourites" LP series, perhaps one of the least well-known is "Venus with Organist and Cupid" (1548), which shows the maestro giving a rousing rendition of "Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside" on his Wurlitzer while seeking inspiration in his muse and staring at her reclining figure. 

Although Pintoricchio's anachronistic "Return of Odysseus" appears to be a textbook case of "Paint it first, then think of the title", the work was created to render homage to Odysseus' faithful and patient spouse, Penelope. For over 20 years, while her errant husband idled around the Aegean, Penelope waited steadfastly by her loom and fended off suitors. Pintoricchio's later version of the same scene was entitled "Where do you think you've been?"

 

erithacus' saga: home entertaining

“You live here?” Mary asked aghast as she sat uncomfortably upright on the non-wobbly end of the camp bed while I brewed some tea. She had removed her shoes when they had become stuck in the quagmire at the entrance to the shed. Now dark sludge oozed between her toes, charmingly I thought.

“Well, I live here for six or seven hours a day and in the warehouse the rest of the time. Do you want some tea?” I asked, flashing a white plastic cup from the top of a thermos flask in front of her and hoping her imagination could whisk her away to afternoon tea in an aristocrat’s mansion. I would have offered her something stronger to try to recapture our earlier passion but I sensed her interest had been assuaged. Besides, all I had was some used solvent-based brush cleaner in the bottom of a jam jar.

“You don’t live there. You work there,” she corrected me.

“What’s that?” I asked, pretending to have forgotten what we were talking about, even though Mary’s expression suggested she would not be led unwittingly into the realms of idle chit chat

“I spend sleeping time here and awake time there,” I pointed out.

I went to the corner of the shed, rummaged among some articles at the bottom of a fertiliser bag and pulled out a dictionary. I looked up the definition of the word “live”.

“Live, verb, one intransitive, be or remain alive; have (especially animal) life, two, intransitive (followed by 'on', subsist or feed (lives on fruit)...."

“You’re weird," Mary declared.

Definition number eight: Make or have one's abode. “Maybe you’re right!” I exclaimed.

“Look,” she said irritably, “going back to a dirty, damp old shed for a shag on a grimy bunk bed and reading dictionaries isn’t living,” she snapped, “it’s being a dickhead”.

“It’s not a bunk bed. It’s a camp bed,“ I corrected her pedantically and bowed my head at the disapproval and reprimand she had delivered.

“Do you want me to heat some water up so you can wash your feet?" I asked.

“No. I can wash them with cold water,” she snapped. I took the opportunity to flee from the tension in the shed and filled the watering can from the rainwater barrel. I went back inside and rummaged around under the Rubens for the orange plastic bowl I often urinated in during the night when the meteorological conditions didn’t invite venturing out to had been christened the Jacuzzi. The bowl wasn’t there.

“If you go to the door and put your feet outside I can pour water over them” I said, indicating the watering can by nodding my head. I looked at Mary. She was crying.

“Don’t cry” I said in an unsuccessfully gentle voice, edging towards her in attempt to soothe her sorrow with my nearby lumbering presence. She moved away brusquely.

“Why shouldn’t I fucking cry?” she snarled. “Why didn’t you tell me you lived in this shithole. I would have gone off to the disco with the others! Where’s the toilet? I need to go to the toilet!”

A few moments later, having convinced her that her shoes were not the ideal footwear for the bathroom and Jacuzzi area, I secured fertiliser bags above her ankles with a couple of extra thick elastic bands and led her outside. This makeshift footwear didn’t prove to be ideal either as she slipped and cursed in the Rubus fructicosus thicket. “Shit” I heard and suspected she’d fallen over completely in the Jacuzzi area.

“I can’t see a fucking thing. There isn’t any light” I stretched my arm inside the thicket and flicked the striker wheel of a cigarette lighter.

She came out of the thicket sniffling, but no longer crying. As long as she isn’t crying she must be alright, I thought childishly.

“What a nightmare,” grumbled Mary as she tried to wipe brown slime off her skirt with a piece of fertiliser bag.

“I want to go home,” she stated.

"You haven't drunk your ...." I started but she was in no mood to linger.

The third phone box we came across worked. We rang for a taxi. It eventually arrived and Mary disappeared into the night.

Johari window 

just happened to be:

Just happened to be in a Gestalt therapy group session. The session involved exploration of the Johari Window, a model invented by a couple of psychologists called Jo and Harry* that is used in self-help groups and for corporate purposes to explore the process of self-disclosure. The window divides interpersonal relationships into four quadrants that define whether or not two communicating parties know information about one of them.

The first quadrant is called the "Arena" and is an open area of knowledge that is common to both parties about one of them. Examples could be name, sex and physical characteristics. In the second quadrant, called the "Facade", the first person knows information about her or himself that the second is unaware of. The third quadrant is called the "Blind Spot". Here, the first person is unaware of information that the second knows. The fourth quadrant is called the "Unknown" and represents information that is unknown to both parties.

Like me, most people in the group were interested in having saucy info about their Blind Spot revealed to them. Others in the group gave me details that ranged from verbal abuse to flattery. Such information also depends on the details others are prepared to give (which reveals the extent to which they are willing to disclose information about themselves). A very useful fact I did learn was that the suit and tie that I believed I was wearing was in reality a nun’s habit and wimple.

* True

Whatever Sheela na Gig represents, she and the Viagra-endorsing Cerne Abbas Giant do make a lovely couple.
 

Sheela na Gig: fertility icon, warning against the sins of the flesh, representation of a Celtic goddess or protection against evil? 

Juan de Flande's "Funny, but suddenly I feel a lot better!" (1514-1518) depicts Lazarus' miraculous resuscitation after Jesus has informed onlookers that Lazarus is, after all, not required to pay but in fact entitled to a rebate.
 

erithacus' saga: recreation

I started working all the overtime I could do. Quick earning suited me and it was warmer in the warehouse than in the shed. I exchanged short, inter-box grunts with other unloaders and struck up some conversations with Mike, the new Cardboard Man. Jim the warehouse manager bullied and scorned Mike and urged other operators to do the same. All because Mike spoke slowly. To Jim, sluggish speech was an obvious sign of idiocy which, reason demanded, should be treated with derision by superior beings. Jim never found out about Mike’s passion for medieval art.

One Friday night I went to the pub with the people from work. Beer swilled. Eyes smarted. Double entendres abounded. Shrieks of laughter pierced bubbling background chatter. Darts were played. Drunkenness prevailed. I sat with Mary and we talked and talked. Well, she talked and I listened. Although my previous encounters with Mr Wilmslow and the old man in the Wayfarer’s Hotel had provided me with precious little emotional preparation for with Mary, things just seemed to fall into place.

The other warehouse operators in the pub seemed surprised by our intimacy. Whenever Mary walked out of the office and into the warehouse, she was usually greeted with wolf whistles and cheers from male workers. Since I didn’t do this I was, according to Jim, obviously “a fucking puff”. Upon uttering these words he would try to establish eye contact with the operators to confirm their complicity and to bond. However, like many authoritarians he was respected very little.

Time flew. Mary and I were entwined in conversation. However, the landlord, not known for his charm, abruptly switched the music of the jukebox off and shouted “We’ve had your money now fuck off!”.

We then had the option of the disco or a curry with the others, or a her place or mine situation. I and my erection preferred the second and preferably her place. Mary explained that, although her son was staying with her ex-husband, her mother was at her place for a few days and so we would have to go to mine. Faced with the choice of Mary’s mother or my cosy shed I reluctantly and anxiously chose the second option.

erithacus' saga: getting to grips with time and relativity

Getting to work at eight o’clock was tricky, especially after I bought a blanket from my first wages in a fit of wanton outsplashery. Lie-ins became tempting. If workers arrived five minutes late, their clock-in cards did not register their starting time until half an hour later. This meant losing twenty-five minutes of their “own time”. At twenty eight minutes past eight there was always a group of latecomers hanging around the warehouse entrance, enjoying a few minutes of their “own time” rather than handing it over freely to the company.

I learnt to calculate whether I was on time for my work by observing the people who were going to theirs. A woman with frizzy red hair would walk past the newsagent’s at ten to eight. That meant I would arrive with one second to go. There was always the chance she might be late, so I therefore needed another person to act as a time control. There were as many to choose from as there were people who did the same things at the same times every day. 1) man in white Jaguar at the traffic lights, 2) woman at the bus stop whose almost-finished cigarette indicated the bus was about to arrive, 3) man dressed in lab coat proficiently directing traffic at the junction near the railway bridge, and 4) kids (problematic in half-term) lingering on their way to school. Just in case, I bought a cheap alarm clock.

just happened to be:

Just happened to be in the Sudanese Ministry of Unnecessary Bureaucracy and Superfluous Paperwork. I had gone there to pick up the exit visa required by all foreigners who had been in Sudan for over six months and wished to leave the country. The combination of Ramadan in the hot season and fast-induced torpor meant little impression was being made on the lengthy queue of people waiting to be attended at the single desk.

In my few days at the ministry I had got to know both Ismael, who worked at the desk, and the other fifty or so people whose jobs did not involve dealing with the public. To my dismay, when my turn came to collect the visa, Ismael told me he couldn’t find my passport anywhere. I leaned over the table and implored him to look again and in so doing moved the desk slightly. One of the table legs was shorter than the others and so an in-house wobbliness compensation system had been devised to stop the desk from moving. The reliability of the system had just been undone. Ismael looked down to sort it out and found a pile of passports.

"Man feigns death for fiscal motives"
 

erithacus' saga: do all miseries indeed derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone?

“Vanguard Fashions Erithacus to the office please”, a tannoy-timbre voice summoned me and put my temporary self-imposed confinement to an end. Warehouse operators were often called to the office and subject to interrogation by Jim the Warehouse Führer about delivery notes they had forgotten or non-correspondence of amounts delivered and actual garment numbers. However, the voice was Mary’s.

I idealised Mary from the first moment I set eyes upon and lusted after her. She was attractive and sharp-witted. Whenever I entered the office and Mary talked to me, I was overcome by a sweet sense of complete wellbeing and eye contact between us gave me an unfamiliar feeling of wholeness.

Destiny was cruel, however, and Mary worked in the same office as Jim. I could not explain why fate had brought the incarnations of good and evil together in the same hardboard-panelled, flickering fluorescent-tube lit office, but those priceless, blissful moments of attunement only occurred when Jim was not present to soil them.

I soon began to get the impression that Mary was calling me to the office with increasing frequency. Being summoned on a regular basis by anyone else might have been cause for vexation because great agility was often required to clamber out from the cardboard warrens without undermining the structure of these temporary erections. Yet when Mary called me I had no objection whatsoever.

German cockroaches live all over the world and are generally known as German cockroaches, except in Germany, where they are called 'Russian cockroaches'. Although the Blattella germanica is not as immediately endearing as a new born lamb or golden retriever puppy, when culturally-inherited prejudices about ugliness are overcome, it makes an excellent pet.
 

just happened to be:

Just happened to be at a conference on criminology. One talk was given by an Interpol bigwig who explained over thirty parameters that forgers need to consider in order to produce convincing banknotes. I was thus prompted to forgo my own rudimentary counterfeiting system of ironed tissue paper, lemon juice and felt-tip pens on account of its potential rumblability.

The failure of the number on my lottery ticket to correspond to that required to win the bumper jackpot prize was also a huge disappointment and a great blow to my aspirations to honour my fiscal obligations.

I therefore resorted to searching the pockets of jackets long since worn and under the cracked olive green 1940s Ministry of Housing ceramic tiles in the hall. This yielded nothing except for a few German cockroaches (Blattella germanica) and their eggs.

erithacus' saga: erithacus is tempted to disregard that established in Exodus 20:15

In order to make sure workers were not stealing garments, a security guard patrolled the warehouse exit and frisked them as they left the premises. Theft however would have been tricky as the clothes had already been fitted with shop security tags and a special door was positioned at the exit to detect would be miscreants. I am not the thieving type but the guard's presence and the security measures induced in me a desire to purloin, even though the ubiquitous presence of the Vanguard Fashions logo on the garments meant I would have only considered wearing them for solitary nocturnal tunnel-digging purposes.

When required by the tax office to pay an amount that exceeded the funds available in the odd sock account, what was needed was a fail-safe way of extracting myself from such a pecuniarily adhesive scenario. Although the invention of false expenditure was initially appealing, providing evidence for the corresponding goods or services might have proved tricky. I therefore found inspiration in Isaak Ouwater's "Lottery Office" (1779). 

In Spain, May and June is the tax return season and locals are often to be seen carrying the brightly-coloured information leaflets of the Agencia Tributaria, or tax office. In "The Tax Collectors" (1542), Marinus van Reymerswaele's depiction of pre-digital collection methods, a taxpayer whose banking entity bypass system is remarkably similar to my own odd sock account takes great pleasure in handing over his dues in the knowledge that his contributions are to be used to provide quality public services.

 

The stag beetle's Latin name, Lucanus cervus, does not come from its resemblance to missing peers, but rather was given to it by Pliny the Elder because these insects were common in Lucania, an ancient district of southern Italy. Unfortunately, the species is now under threat. The beetle reacts to large approaching objects by remaining motionless and posing and is thus both a good photographic subject and easy prey for magpies, badgers, foxes, hedgehogs, cats and woodpeckers. 

In "Still life with Pygmy Parrot" and "Still Life with Stag Beetle" Georg Flegel (1563-1638) had already shown a great ability to convince animals to pose for long periods of time while he painted them. Here, Flegel magnificently captures a pre-IKEA in-built wall recess, entitled "Cupboard", the resounding popularity of which prompted his "Come in and make a seat" customer-assembled furniture and household fixtures series.

 

erithacus' saga: a place of my own

I was soon promoted from folding cardboard to unloading boxes from the lorries that delivered the clothes. The boxes were then stored in different places in the warehouse. This provided a golden opportunity to build cardboard dens, igloos or yurt-like structures in strategic places, the purpose of which was to provide a hiding place in which I could temporarily get out of unloading and storing more boxes. However, when shirking I invariably found myself sitting silently in my hideaway wondering why I had the feeling that hiding away was no more or less enjoyable than unloading and storing boxes

Contrary to popular belief, the ability of some chameleon species to change their body colour is not an adaptation to surroundings but an expression of the lizard's physiological or psychological condition. Its skin colour changes according to mood, light and temperature. The apparent absence of a chameleon on an untidy desk does not necessarily mean an animal is not there, but rather that it is sulking. The same is now believed to apply to keys and wallets.